By Robert Reich
When do he and his followers think America was “great?”
Friends,
The question is no longer whether Trump wants to roll back America to an earlier time. The question I hear debated is when? What period of American history is he trying to recapture? When was America “great?” in his and his followers’ view?
I’ve spoken to a variety of American historians, political scientists, and social psychologists about this and received several answers. Let me share them with you, and then ask you to share your view with the rest of us.
1. He wants to take us back to the early 2000s, when George W. Bush was president and Trump was a fixture on reality television, barking, “You’re fired!” every week. He may see it as a great time, but it was also the era when Bush’s tax cut began to explode the federal budget deficit and national debt. It was an era when many Americans could hold on to their middle-class lifestyles only by using the rising values of their homes as collateral for bank loans and refinancing their mortgages — unaware that Wall Street was packaging risky loans with less risky ones and selling the packages to investors who thought the good times would last forever. And it was the era when, in the wake of the horror of 9/11, America sought to root out terrorism by invading Afghanistan, seeking regime change in Iraq in an ill-fated attempt to destroy “weapons of mass destruction,” and embracing torture.
2. He wants to take us back to the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was president. Trump often talks about how great America was in the 1980s, when Trump’s own real estate empire was in its heyday and he was featured regularly in the tabloids as he squired models around Manhattan. But it was also the era when American competitiveness began to erode, as Japan (soon followed by China) began hollowing out American industry. The decade was also marked by the increasing dominance of Wall Street, as the character Gordon Gekko announced “greed is good,” and financial entrepreneurship replaced product entrepreneurship as the dominant force in the economy. Not least, it was the decade when HIV-AIDS took the lives of 100,777 Americans and became a leading cause of death among young adults.
3. He wants to roll America back to the 1950s of his childhood, with its “Leave It To Beaver” era of peace and prosperity. Trump and his lackeys often express nostalgia for the 1950s, without acknowledging that it was an era when women and people of color were still second-class citizens and when Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt ruined thousands of careers. While it’s true that during the 1950s America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen, Trump doesn’t acknowledge that much of that middle-class wealth was built on the growing power of labor unions — which, by the mid-1950s, had gained the membership of over a third of all private-sector workers. The era also harbored heightened fears of nuclear war, communism, and homosexuality. It was a time of male dominance of traditional households and crass conformity.
4. He wants to take us back to the Gilded Age when William McKinley was “the Tariff King.” At a Cabinet meeting last week, Trump claimed, “Our country was the wealthiest, proportionately the wealthiest, from 1870 to 1913.” He conveniently overlooks the staggering inequalities of the Gilded Age, its unsafe food, its toxic drugs, polluted drinking water, and dangerous workplaces (such as the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, whose fire took the lives of 146 workers, mostly young women). It was also an era of child labor and urban poverty. The era featured the worst political corruption in American history — in which the lackeys of the robber baron capitalist tycoons literally placed bags of money on the desks of pliant legislators. Women weren’t allowed to vote. Black people were subjected to Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. Native Americans were all but wiped out.